My partner drinks and I don't know if I should stay

You do not mean to count, but you do. The second glass, the trip to the kitchen that is a bit too quick, the sound of a can. Friday night, and then Saturday afternoon, and then Sunday because it is Sunday. On Monday there is a promise, and you want so badly to believe it that you do, a little. By Thursday you are listening for the key in the door and trying to tell from the footsteps.

Perhaps they are a lovely drunk, warm and funny, and the problem is only the next morning and the money and the lifts you end up giving. Perhaps they are not. Perhaps the children have learned to go upstairs at a certain point in the evening, and you have noticed that, and filed it somewhere you do not look at often.

Friends say it is just how people are round here. Some of them drink as much. You are not sure whether you are overreacting or whether you have been underreacting for years.

What tends to be going on

Drinking that has become a dependency has its own course, and it does not run on the timetable of your relationship. The household slowly organises itself around it. Your role shifts from partner to monitor: you check, you cover, you drive, you make the excuses to the in-laws. The drinker's role shifts too, and often they come to resent you for the very management they rely on.

The question people ask themselves ("is it bad enough?") is usually the wrong one. There is no threshold at which it becomes allowed to matter. The better questions are: what is this costing me, and the children, and our money, and my own health? And has anything about it changed in the last year, other than the promises?

Two things change the picture. First, if there is fear in the house when they have been drinking (shouting that frightens you, things broken, threats, driving with the children after drinking), then this is a question about safety as well as drink, and the free module Is this danger? comes first. Second, drink and control often travel together, and drink gets the blame for behaviour that continues when they are sober. Notice whether the sober version of your partner owns what the drunk version did, with specifics and without turning it on you.

An honest check, because this page is for you and not for them: notice your own drinking too, and whether it has crept up alongside theirs. It often does.

What to look at first

The cost, written down. People living with a drinker get very good at not adding it up. Four weeks of noticing, without arguing about it, tells you more than a year of promises. What was cancelled, what was spent, what you did not say, what the children saw.

Real change against performed change. Real change tends to look like them naming the problem as theirs, getting help they chose themselves (GP, a local alcohol service, a mutual-aid group), and holding it over months without needing you to applaud. Performed change tends to look like a dry fortnight timed to end a row, and a sense that you now owe them something for it.

Your own support. Al-Anon exists for exactly your position and costs nothing. Adfam and your GP are there for you as well as for them. You are allowed help whether or not they ever get any.

Where you have ended up. Who were you before you spent your evenings listening for footsteps? That is a question about you, not about their drinking, and it is one of the most useful ones to sit with.

One next step

The module When the problem is drink, drugs or compulsion goes through how dependency shapes a relationship, how to tell where you stand in it, and what a fair test of change looks like, with an exercise you do rather than read. If you want to begin by describing your situation, the assessment will show you how what you have told it fits together.

If you are frightened by what happens when they drink, the National Domestic Abuse Helpline is 0808 2000 247, free and 24 hours. The Men's Advice Line is 0808 801 0327. Galop, for LGBT+ people, is 0800 999 5428. In an emergency, 999. Drinkline, 0300 123 1110, is a free, confidential line for anyone worried about their own or someone else's drinking.